Maestro in Moscow

But Chernobyl shouldn’t obscure another, less known, 20th anniversary: that of Vladimir Horowitz’s trip to his homeland 61 years after he left, crowned by his performance at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory just six days before the nuclear disaster. For it was in that moment, when Horowitz stepped onto the stage, that something seismic happened in the Soviet Union: Russians, who had been more or less severed from their pre-Bolshevik past, were suddenly reunited with it. As the first few notes of Scarlatti’s Sonata in B Minor emanated from the nine-foot Steinway grand, something beautiful, even mystical, in the Russian consciousness was reawakened.

Blumenfeld, Goldenweiser, Rachmaninoff, Igumnov, Nikolaev, Neuhaus–these were the men who had given shape and lyricism to the Russian school of piano-playing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Their style was grand and deeply felt, not so cerebral as the Germans; but delicate, lovely, finely etched. They had flourish. They had exquisite technique, sadness, a poetic imagination that reached deep into the Slavic identity. There was something mythological about them.

But in the decades after the Bolshevik Revolution, many of these pianists and their disciples left the country, or were restricted from traveling abroad, or simply died, and the grandness of Russian music was subsumed by History. True, the Soviets valued music, and there were hundreds, if not thousands, of gifted musicians still playing in the conservatories. But this was music working at the behest of socialism; this was not music for music’s sake. The Golden Age of Russian piano was dead.

Until Vladimir Horowitz, then 82, strode onto the stage of the Great Hall in his tuxedo, waving and smiling in his curious, playful way. It was 4 p.m., Sunday, the only time and day of the week Horowitz would play, at the Moscow Conservatory, Carnegie Hall, wherever. Outside, it was raining. For the next 90 minutes, Horowitz–or as the Russians knew him, Gorovitz, or Volodya–played Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, and Moszkowski. He topped off the concert with Rachmaninoff’s “Polka de W.R.”

“They went crazy for that,” Peter Gelb, Horowitz’s manager at the time, said of the Rachmaninoff.

Horowitz was not the kind of man you might expect to stir Russian passions. He was a Jew, not an ethnic Russian, he was gay or bisexual, and he had fled the motherland. Unlike, say, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, exiled for writing books about the Gulag, Horowitz always seemed only vaguely aware that there was much of a world beyond his own. He was not a recluse in Vermont pining for old Russia. He was a luminary, a member of the New York establishment; he inhabited a rarefied ether.

Of course, he knew about things outside his constellation of preludes, sonatas, and mazurkas; and he read the New York Times, and he had toured the globe. But he was also neurotic and self-absorbed. What he really cared about was his tone, his interpretation, the arc of his phrasing, his legato and timbre, and the curvature of his fingers striking, nudging, cajoling the keys into an otherworldly sound. He was not a champion of the people.

But they were mad about him anyway. When he played that day in Moscow, there was silence, love, awe. When he stopped playing, there was near pandemonium, bravo after bravo after bravo. His program was quintessentially Horowitz: The largest number of selections was dedicated to romantic composers; only one piece–the Scarlatti sonata–came from the baroque period; and only one–Mozart’s Sonata in C Major–from the classical. The apex of the concert came toward the end of the first half, with two Rachmaninoff preludes followed by two Scriabin études: 10 minutes and 10 seconds of pure, Russian art. Hewing to tradition, Horowitz also played the Träumerei, one of Schumann’s Kinderszenen. (He had revived much of Schumann’s more esoteric literature.)

As always, there was the performer’s sense of showmanship: He studiously avoided more intellectually demanding pieces such as Schumann’s Kreisleriana or one of Prokofiev’s sonatas or Brahms’s Handel Variations, all of which would have fit with his program, and stuck to shorter pieces or, in the case of the Mozart, easily digestible. He was, as Gelb noted, well aware that millions around the globe would be watching a televised broadcast of the biggest concert of his life. Certainly, he didn’t want to alienate any nonaficionados.

His programming was always exquisite, “as if he were a great chef,” said David Dubal, who is on the piano faculty at Juilliard and was a friend in his later years:

The Soviets understood something about Horowitz’s power. This may be why only 400 tickets of the approximately 2,000 went to the general public; the rest were for diplomats and government officials. And it may explain why the only advertisement for the recital was a single poster at the conservatory. Still, on the day of the concert, an overflow crowd poured into the hall, squeezing into aisles, staircases, entranceways–anywhere a human body could possibly fit.

Lena Baranov, a pianist who emigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Mark, a violinist, recalled a story told to her by a friend who was at the concert. “A student asked a guard to let him in,” said Baranov (who, I should add, was also my teacher). Referring to the founder of the secret police, the student said to the guard: “‘Please, I beg you, let me in. You know what Horowitz means to musicians? It’s like Dzerzhinsky for you.'”

Lest anyone think that only a small subset of musicians cared about Horowitz’s trip to the Soviet Union–that his fame there was compartmentalized much the way high culture is in America–it’s worth bearing in mind that “Gorovitz” remains a household name among educated Russians, which is to say, among many.

Horowitz, however, was not drawn to the Soviet Union by popular demand. For one thing, there had never been such a thing in the Soviet Union as popular demand–at least, as it’s understood in the West. Indeed, few, if any, Russians imagined they would ever see the great man play; it was hard enough to get his recordings.

Instead, the concert stemmed from a cultural-exchange agreement reached between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev the year before. Like Nikita Khrushchev with his “thaw” in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Gorbachev encouraged a more robust (even dissonant) artistic expression. This was an expression intended to reflect the more humane, multidimensional politics that the generation of Communists who had come of age under Khrushchev aspired to: the long-hoped-for “socialism with a human face.” But the Soviet authorities overseeing Horowitz’s trip lagged behind Gorbachev. They were apparatchiks, functionaries of the previous era, with all its numbing, neo-Stalinist assumptions and methods. They didn’t quite know how to manage an international celebrity. They were wary of him, and even a little afraid. No doubt, the unmanageability of an artist with enormous evocative power made them uneasy.

Gelb, who produced the television broadcast of the concert, recalled that he didn’t want a Soviet crew handling the show. So he had to have a special, state-of-the-art television truck driven to Moscow from Switzerland. At a certain point, Gelb said, it became clear the Soviet authorities, suspicious of Western television crews, weren’t going to let the truck cross the Polish border.

“I remember going through this very elaborate charade with the American ambassador, Arthur Hartman,” Gelb said. “I would have conversations with him in loud whispers, knowing the Soviets were listening in. I remember telling him, very theatrically, that Mr. Horowitz and Mrs. Horowitz and I were leaving tomorrow for America because it was obvious the Soviets were going to double-cross us.” Gelb told Hartman he was surprised that the Communist authorities would jeopardize a concert made possible by their own president.

“Within a few minutes,” he said, “the phone rang.” Gelb got his television truck.

But the Soviets could stomach only so much. Horowitz’s concert was broadcast live in scores of countries, on CBS in the United States, on the BBC in Britain, and all across Western Europe, Latin America, and the Far East. The one country where it was not broadcast live was the country in which the concert was given.

There’s a logic to this. First, there were the Americans. What were they really going to broadcast? And were they really just television producers? Was Horowitz just a musician? No doubt, the CIA had a hand in all this.

Then there was fear, woven into the totalitarian psychology, of the Russian people.

It’s well known, after all, that people living under totalitarian regimes take art more seriously than they do in the free world. Ignat Solzhenitsyn, the son of the writer and music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, called American audiences excellent but said that, in Russia and Germany, the people who attend classical music performances are truly exceptional.

“Those are two countries where music just seems to mean more,” Solzhenitsyn said. His explanation, shared by other musicians, is that music in authoritarian societies “becomes a vehicle for the affirmation of human dignity.”

While the vast majority of Westerners, including many below their countries’ officially designated poverty lines, can focus on happiness or self-fulfillment, nearly everyone in police states must attend to more basic concerns: not getting arrested, finding something to eat, staying warm, staying alive. Life is stripped of change or meaning–or, more important, the possibility of change or meaning. Hope fades into fear. Fear is overcome by rage, which is overcome by resignation and passivity, bitterness, depression.

But in the artist resides something transcendent. It is here that the people, boxed into a permanent grayness, find their voice, a metaphor for and expression of everything they crave, for themselves and for a country that does not exist. Yet the artist doesn’t simply dole out his art. He doesn’t perform and then depart the stage, leaving his fans to their locked-up selves. He reminds them that, in art, is the power to hear and imagine beautiful sounds, irrespective of the KGB.

Like Bernard Malamud’s Yakov Bok, who finds freedom in Spinoza’s metaphysics even as he sits in a Kiev jail, the people who attended Horowitz’s concert, and the people who heard the stories about that concert, and the people who heard the stories about the stories, were reminded that they are, on some fundamental level, free so long as they have music, not popular culture, not throwaway riffs programmed by record-company executives, but music–and timelessness.

This is why Horowitz, who didn’t even come from Russia proper–he was born in Ukraine–scared the Soviet authorities. Perhaps not in any immediate or stated sense: I doubt that any Politburo member ever issued a memo about the threat to national security posed by the imperialist-Zionist “Pinci” (as Horowitz’s wife, Wanda Toscanini Horowitz, the daughter of Arturo Toscanini, called him). But in some darkened corner of the nomenklatura imagination, there must have been at least some inkling that Horowitz represented something real and essential about Russia, that the truth, the irreducible nous of the nation, could be found in his music, a truth that happened to coincide with the first opening-up in Soviet life in a quarter-century.

Horowitz died on November 5, 1989. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed. Today, Moscow, if not the whole of Russia, looks like an alien universe. The staidness of the Soviet era has melted into a hyperkinetic flux: pre-revolutionary apartment blocks razed, hotels refurbished, ministries converted, four-cylinder Volgas replaced by BMW sedans. A “junk culture,” as Dubal puts it, has infected the country, just as it has done in the West. Everywhere in Russia there are cafés and nightclubs filled with synthesizer-driven techno.

But Horowitz remains a widely respected fixture, at least among people of a certain age. He is remembered now much the way he was thought of then, as one of the 20th century’s great virtuosos. Unlike Andrei Sakharov, the physicist and human-rights activist, and Solzhenitsyn père, both of whom have acquired a certain dustiness tinged with controversy, there is nothing dusty or controversial about Vladimir Horowitz.

There is a good reason for this, and it’s not that Horowitz’s art was apolitical and, therefore, untethered to the shifting, political winds. It’s that Horowitz’s art does not tell Russians what is wrong with Russia; it tells them what is right. This may surprise Westerners. In the West, we celebrate some of our sharpest critics. We think that criticism of the place we come from shows integrity and courage. It is supposed to be a hallmark of our openness. In the West, in certain refined circles, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, like Gorbachev and Boris Pasternak, are heroes, and Horowitz is a man who played the piano very, very well.

But in Russia, then and now, Vladimir Horowitz is not a man who simply played the piano. He is a man who reached deep into the Russian psyche and pulled out something beautiful, and said: This is who you are. There is a correlation here. So long as music matters as much as it does to Russians, democracy will remain more hope than reality. Once democracy has truly penetrated Russia, junk culture will conquer all. There will still be the likes of Horowitz, of course, but he will be a cordoned-off Horowitz, the way he was in America, living in a quaint, funny world on the Upper East Side, playing concerts for people who listen to slow-moving music in old auditoriums on Sunday afternoons. Life will be neater. There will be less passion.

That may not be ideal, Ignat Solzhenitsyn says, but it will be much better than Soviet Russia; it will be better than Russia today.

“I don’t subscribe to this notion that some people do,” says the conductor, who is a pianist himself. “Well, you know, who really needs freedom or economic property rights? What you really need is just culture. It’s easy for a rich, free Westerner to say, ‘Yes, they may not be free, but everybody can spell.’ I think you have to be very careful with that. I would much rather see a free and prosperous Russia where concert halls are less packed than a Russia under Stalin’s terror in 1937, or even under Brezhnev.”

Peter Savodnik is senior editor at the Moscow Times.